Just a brief note of thanks to you, your Governors, staff, and students for giving Mark and I such a warm welcome and inspiring visit on Wednesday.

You certainly have a very important community at Rye Studio School. Mark and I were hugely impressed with the extraordinary will to succeed from every member of your team, students included. We concluded that together you are demonstrating the very best of how to ‘add value’ for your students in preparing them for rewarding lives beyond your school gates. The quality of their work was outstanding.

I do hope we can tempt you to come and see Dorset’s studio school at work, once we are up and running. Sharing more experiences would be of great value I’m sure.

For a Farmer, and a Forestry contractor, with no real experience of education beyond our own children, it was an extra ordinary day, humbling to think that it was just another ‘day at the office’ for you.

I’ve copied in Matthew Price, our chair of Governors so he appreciates how important a day it was for us.

I hope you get the chance to enjoy a bit of a break over the next few weeks,